Your Definitive Guide to All of Haruki Murakami’s Books / Hillary Kelly In: Vulture Oct. 9, 2018

Classic

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997)

 
In this jam-packed novel about alienation between husbands and wives, Japan’s postwar role in the world, the aftereffects of sexual abuse, and more, Murakami channels Joyce, Philip K. Dick, and Don DeLillo, braiding their styles into one all his own. The overarching narrative concerns Toru Okada’s strange quest to recover his missing cat — and missing wife. But the heart of the novel is an expansive detour about the aptly nicknamed Boris the Manskinner, a Russian operative sent into the Manchurian countryside during the brutal Second Sino-Japanese War. Murakami, at his very best, captures the 20th century — surreal, unbelievable, and too horrifying not to be true.

Norwegian Wood (1989)

 
This is the book that transformed Murakami from Japanese success to international phenomenon. A rare work of realism, it chronicles the long-distance love affair of Toru and Naoko — the former girlfriend of Toru’s childhood best friend, who killed himself at 17. In soft, spare prose, Murakami juxtaposes Naoko’s life inside a rural mental-health clinic with Toru’s languid days, loving her from afar while falling for another woman. It’s a defining love story of the twentieth century, proof that Murakami is at least as effective without his surrealist shtick, if not more so. Read it if you’ve ever been in love, are in love, or want to be in love.

Kafka on the Shore (2005)

 
Fifteen-year-old runaway “Kafka” Tamura has taken up residence inside a library, where he has erotic dreams about the librarian. Elderly Nakata, who lost his higher cognition in a bizarre childhood incident, searches the streets for missing cats. Their stories develop in tandem, and as Murakami explained in an interview, the book “contains several riddles,” and “through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape.” This sounds maddening, but instead if feels like a scavenger hunt among dreams far more beautiful than your own. John Updike called it “an insistently metaphysical mind-bender”; it’s also one of the deepest works in modern fiction. ... [mehr] http://www.vulture.com/article/best-haruki-murakami-books-ranked.html